Spirit but no soul in loud Bring It On musical
Like a weak episode of "Glee" shot up with steriods and stuffed full of anti-depressants, Bring It On: The Musical sends up a rousing cheer for the robotic vapidity of the new Broadway. The real shame about this overblown movie-to-stage adaptation is that it's chock full of appealing, talented and boundlessly energetic young performers, but their sparkling humanity is mostly lost in the non-stop machine of this depressingly mechanical, surprisingly shrill effort (a part of the SHN season).
Targeted to an age range of teens to twentysomethings who slavishly recite lines from the 2000 movie starring Kirsten Dunst as a beleaguered cheerleading squad captain, this musical has a startling pedigree with its multi-award-winning creative team. You'd think among this heavily lauded crowd of artists that someone could have located a little heart or a moment of actual human connection. But no. This is musical by committee, and a strenuous effort it seems to have been.
Making a musical Garden grow
The Secret Garden will always hold a special place in my heart. It was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. And because I was there with friends who had friends in high places, we got to go backstage afterward. On my first day in New York, just after my first Broadway show, I got to stand center stage of the St. James Theatre and stare out into the empty theater. Amazing experience.
We got to go backstage, where I met Alison Fraser and, almost by accident, Rebecca Luker. Also go to see Mandy Patinkin pitch a fit because he didn't want to meet people, dammit, between shows. That was interesting.
I'm thinking about The Secret Garden because I just saw TheatreWorks' second production of the show.
Oh do do the Xanadu that you do so well
When I called playwright Douglas Carter Beane to interview him for a San Francisco Chronicle story on Xanadu: The Musical at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, he happened to be taking a break from rehearsals for his latest Broadway show, Lysistrata Jones. That musical, a hip, funny adaptation of the Aristophanes classic, happens to rehearse in the same building as the Foxwoods Theatre, home to Broadway's notorious web slinger, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
With his ear pressed to his cell phone, Beane surveyed the crowded sidewalk and quipped. "I hope people don't think I'm buying tickets."
Berkeley Rep's wildly wonderful Bride
Such joy. Such wicked, delicious, heart-pounding joy.
That's what it feels like at the end of The Wild Bride, the dark fairy tale come to life on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda stage. This is, without question, the great treat of the holiday theater season (though it's not really for kids younger than about 13, what with the mutilations, the sex and the devilish nature of the show).
Here comes the Bride indeed – in the most unexpectedly charming and poignant fashion you can imagine. Director/adaptor Emma Rice and Kneehigh, the quirky troupe from Cornwall, England, are blessedly back in the Bay Area, where they previously triumphed with their dynamic adaptation of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter at American Conservatory Theater a couple seasons back. May they keep coming back. And back.
Adjusting to a Period of lighter Tennessee Williams
As a fading Southern belle in a Tennessee Williams play might say, "Well I do declare! What's a theatergoer to do with so many scrumptious Williams play from which to choose?"
The answer is: see all of them. As we come to the end of Williams' centenary year, it seems only appropriate to be reveling in the writer's work. Marin Theatre Company recently opened a lovely production of The Glass Menagerie (read my review here), and in January, Theatre Rhinoceros presents The Two-Character Play, which Williams claimed was his "most beautiful play since Streetcar."
There's no mistaking Williams' A Period of Adjustment, now at SF Playhouse, for one of his most beautiful plays. Nor is it even one of his most interesting. But it is fascinating for a number of reasons. Written in 1960, between Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana, Adjustment is Williams working in sitcom mode as if to prove that he's capable of something lighter.
Marin reveals crystaline Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams' first brilliant move was to let everyone off the hook – himself included. By alerting the audience that The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, he removes it from reality (or not) and lets the creative team and the audience make their own accommodations as to what is memory, what is fact and what is flight of artistic fancy. In other words, you can try to get away with just about anything because it's all a memory, right?
Marin Theatre Company's production of Menagerie doesn't stray too far from tradition, but director Jasson Minadakis definitely puts his own spin on the 1944 classic and gets some marvelous performances from his cast.
Seducing Amy Glazer (away from the stage)
Theater folk know Amy Glazer as one of the busiest directors in Bay Area theater. But she also has a burgeoning career as a film director, which is no surprise given that she grew up on movie sets.
I interviewed Glazer for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle pegging to the release of her second full-length feature, Seducing Charlie Barker, which is based on Theresa Rebeck's play The Scene, which Glazer directed at SF Playhouse in 2008. (Read my review of that production here.)
Stravinsky and the sadness of a puppet Soldier
As the weary soldier trudges down the road home, you see the weight of his exhaustion as well as his excitement to see his mother and fiancée in his every step. The remarkable thing is that this soldier – who goes by the name of Joseph – is a Bunraku-style puppet. All that extraordinary expression is coming from his puppeteer, Muriel Maffre, the San Francisco Ballet star who retired in 2007.
Along with Aurora Theatre Company artistic director Tom Ross, Maffre is the co-director of The Soldier's Story, a theatrical fusion of music, dance, puppetry and storytelling that carries a melancholy charm for its brief 75 minutes. Much of that charm comes from Maffre, who also dances the role of the King's daughter, who falls under Joseph's spell.
It's easy to succumb to this Tale.
Fela! explodes with music, dance
You don’t walk into Fela! expecting Oklahoma!. With the visionary Bill T. Jones serving as director, choreographer and co-writer, you know this is going to be different. And it’s going to be something to see.
Fela! is a concert, a dance extravaganza and, to a lesser degree, a theatrical biography of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. It is, in short, a raging party.
Such a hybrid experience is only fitting for Fela, a renegade pop star, activist, agitator and rebel. Was he a man driven by social conscience? By ego (he did, after all, have 28 wives)? After seeing the show, my guess is both. We’re a little short on details but long on feeling.
Tip o’ the Hat to Yee's wacky theatrical fable
Talk about your unconventional love stories! Lauren Yee’s charming world-premiere play A Man, his Wife, and his Hat is a romance between an elderly hat maker and his favorite hat.
So where does this relationship leave the hat maker’s wife? Lonely and without a hat, that’s where. When she up and leaves, it’s hardly surprising. The only question was why was she with this chapeau-loving bozo in the first place?
There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense in this story, but that’s part of the point. Yee, working under commission from San Rafael’s AlterTheater has created a quirky fable with a decidedly Yiddish storytelling tilt. It doesn’t all hold together in director Robin Stanton’s enjoyable production, though there’s genuine humor and emotion in abundance.
Time gets Sticky in experimental show
I was enthralled by the form and baffled by the content. That, in a nutshell, is my reaction to the world premiere of Sticky Time, an experimental new work from writer/director Marilee Talkington. A co-production of Crowded Fire Theater Company and Talkington's own Vanguardian Productions, Sticky Time is a wild hour of theater.
I will not begin to pretend that I understood any of it. In plain fact, I did not. When I got home, I read the program, and the thoughts of dramaturg Laura Brueckner and science advisor Andrew Meisel were very interesting – all about the nature of time, which is an interesting blend of science and philosophy – but in the moment of the show, I strained to understand but failed.
Fuzzy no more: life after Disneyland
Last summer at Berkeley's Impact Theatre, Trevor Allen dusted off Working for the Mouse, his finely tuned one-man show about his years as Pluto, Mr. Smee, the Mad Hatter and others on the pavement at Disneyland.
I reviewed the show in June (read the review) and had a chance to interview Allen about the show as he prepared to re-open it at the EXIT Theatre. Read the feature in the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Oh, Maureen! Ms. McVerry revisits the Gershwins
In 1993, an ebullient comedienne with a head full of red curls, danced and sang her way across the stage of the Gershwin Theatre (aka the Presentation Theatre) as the bubbly title character in Oh, Kay! a giddy 1926 musical with a score by George and Ira Gershwin.
Maureen McVerry, long one of the Bay Area’s most reliable musical comedy stars, appeared to have a grand time playing a Jazz Age baby wriggling her way through Prohibition and attempting to win the affections of the handsome Jimmy Winter.
McVerry (seen in the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival production at right) made a memorable entrance with a boat on her back. “’Are you sure this is how Gertrude Lawrence got her start,’ I remember thinking,” McVerry says on the phone from her Potrero Hill home.
McVerry is back in the land of Oh, Kay!, this time as the director. She’s helming a slightly revised version for 42nd Street Moon, which begins previews today (Nov. 2) and opens this weekend.
Thrilling return to form in trippy Totem
It's never good to speak ill of those no longer with us, but the last touring Cirque du Soleil show that stopped in San Francisco, Ovo, was all about the insect world. And truth be told, it bugged. The show only added to my Cirque fatigue – a feeling that my enthusiasm for the company, which had once thrilled me beyond belief, was wearing terribly thin.
But then along comes Totem, the latest touring show from the Montreal-based circus empire, and the enthusiasm barometer rises again. This show, playing in the yellow-and-blue striped "grand chapiteau" behind AT&T Park, returns a sense of wonder to the big top. There's visual magic in this show and scenes of breathtaking beauty.
David Mamet stages a Race to obfuscation
David Mamet never fails to fog me up.
He's never been one of my favorite playwrights because, although he's a wizard of compelling dialogue and unquestionable intelligence, his view of the world is just too bleak for me. Finding kindness and compassion and spirituality in his work is never as easy as finding brutality, ugliness and the absolute worst in mankind. I'm not saying he's wrong in his assessment, it's just that he makes me feel like Pollyanna in comparison. I don't need a steady stream of sunshine, flowers and unicorns.
Mamet's Race is making its West Coast debut in a compelling production from American Conservatory Theater. Director Irene Lewis isn't messing around.
Hair today...
In which I discuss my Broadway debut in Hair and link to my San Francisco Chronicle review of the touring production.Let the sun shine. Let the sun shine. The sunshine in.
Kym Barrett designs a Cirque evolution
You don't go to a Cirque du Soleil show just to see the costumes. Audiences are usually slathering for the death-defying acrobatics and goofy clowns. But what separates a Cirque show from the rest of the circus fray is the spectacle, and that certainly has a lot to do with the costumes.
The latest touring Cirque opus is Totem, another artsy epic under a blue-and-yellow striped tent behind AT&T Park. The theme for this show is evolution, and the costumes are by a charming Australian designer named Kym Barrett. She's best known for her work in movies – perhaps you've seen one of the Matrix movies or Speed Racer? If you haven't caught one of those, you can check out her work in the upcoming reboot of the Spider-man franchise and the film adaptation of the hit novel Cloud Atlas.
Todd Murray’s voice: delicious as warm bread
Not many people can claim success in the fields of musical theater, bread baking and crooning. Todd Murray can.
Growing up in a small Pennsylvania farming community, Murray had two loves. One was music. The other was food. In the pre-Internet, pre-cable TV days, Murray figured it would be impossible to break into the entertainment industry and maybe not as difficult to break into the food biz. Up until his senior year of high school, he had his sites set on chef school.
But then in college, he started gravitating toward performing and started getting jobs in Opryland USA, Tokyo Disneyland and summer stock in his home state.
Project bridges Spacey and SF
The Bridge Project, that transatlantic experiment in blending American and English actors and designers is slowly wending its way to a close after three seasons. The final lap of the project, a collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Old Vic in London and director Sam Mendes' production company, is Shakespeare's Richard III starring The Old Vic's artistic director, a dude named Kevin Spacey.
Neither Spacey nor Mendes made himself available to the press to promote the San Francisco stop on the R3 world tour, so I wrote a feature for the San Francisco Chronicle about the Bridge Project itself.
Singing the blues in TheatreWorks' bumpy Clementine
In this week's edition of the Palo Alto Weekly I reviewed the world premiere of Clementine in the Lower 9 at TheatreWorks.You can read the review here.